What was the key turning point in WW2

[Roadkill]

Barbarossa was the most significant turning point IMO.

If Russia had stayed out of the war it would have been touch and go whether Britain could have survived, American help or no. Opening up a second front by attacking the USSR was about the most stupid thing Hitler could have done.

 

[dash_two]

People are a bit hard on the Italians. Surely it was a praiseworthy thing that the average Italian soldier didn't want to throw his life away for Mussolini?

Saw a documentary a while ago about British soldiers kept in an Italian POW camp. One of them reminisced about how he and some others escaped. They made fair going until they were recaptured and sent back to the same camp. The camp commandant greeted them with these words:

"What do you want to be escaping for? You could have been shot! And then what would your mother say?"

 

[Roadkill]

Saw a documentary a while ago about British soldiers kept in an Italian POW camp. One of them reminisced about how he and some others escaped. They made fair going until they were recaptured and sent back to the same camp. The camp commandant greeted them with these words:

"What do you want to be escaping for? You could have been shot! And then what would your mother say?"

I'm named after my great uncle, who fell down a hillside and was killed trying to escape from an Italian PoW camp.

 

[rhys gethin]

attacking russia. either that or forcing out the jewish scientists.

I think Germany was doomed from the moment it adopted nazism, which actually managed to make capitalism less efficient by giving the fuhrer's underlings competing, overlapping empires. All the rest flows from the same halfwitted 'competitive' stupidity, and to the lack of care for people that didn't provide the troops with winter clothing and so on. The racist idiocy meant that people like the Ukranians who at first looked on the Germans as liberators were regarded as untermensch and put right off - and so on. The nutters were trying to take over the nut-house, where the mad-doctors had at least a bit more sense than them.

 

[Dhimmi]

So what about the battle fo britain and D-Day.

I suppose by D-Day even if it failed there would have been the option of pushing through italy, and of course the bomb. So would the success of D-Day count as the final decisive moment?

The battle of Britain is an interesting one, not sure I could call it one way or another.

D-Day was impressive but I think it was seriously over-hyped at the time and that carries on to today. I know a lot of allied veterans of the invasion of Italy felt that their endeavours were ignored in favour of D-Day, and quite unfairly so.

I think the common perception of D-Day is that once they landed they just turned left and drove to Berlin. It was much harder than that of course and pretty touch and go.

For me the final decisive moment would be crossing the Rhine en masse.

 

[citydreams]

1944, British radar technology was coupled with American electronic predictor technology just in time to master the V1 cruise missile.

 

[Dante]

i'm finding this increasingly interesting, because it seems to be more a question of when Hitlers ego made the ultimate mistake, rather than the outcome of the engangement it initiated.

Or perhaps the turnig point was in a way the battle of britain, when the allies could begin the offensive rather than the defensive.

on the technology fron though, radara nd the home chain stations were immensly important, but wone cant overlook enigma

 

[Andy the Don]

1944, British radar technology was coupled with American electronic predictor technology just in time to master the V1 cruise missile.

The V1 blitz on London only lasted 80 days due to the allies over running the launch sites (the V1 had a limited range). Although the Nazis were still able to launch V1's against England by "backpacking" the V1 to Ju88's & launching them from the air.

This is a great resource on the subject..http://www.flyingbombsandrockets.com/index.html

 

[david dissadent]

My opinion is that the Nazis focused on the UK in the autumn of 1940, where they had no sea worthy amphibious capacity at all, the invasion of Britain was never realistic. Had they driven straight for the jugular and gone for Arabian oil via Turkey in 1940 they could have been laughing in 1941. Although it is plausable to have avoided Turkey and island hopped from Crete to Cyprus to Syria.

Building Bismark, Tirpitz, Scharnhorst & Gneisenau instead of uboats was another blunder, but once the British seen they were building a uboat waffe of strength they may have slowed or stopped the KGV class and gone for Flowers and other corvettes and sloops in 1937 giving them 100s to block up the gap between the UK and nuteral Norway in 1939.

Stalingrad was a battle that the Soviets could have recovered from the loss off, but I dont see how the Nazis would have prospered in the longer term. The deeper into the USSR they drove the further they had to cart everything with the same number of trucks and horses. The Soviets holding onto Moscow and not psycologicaly collapsing in the winter of 1941 is probibly the moment that the war was lost for them. All that was left is making them realise this. That took 4 years and tens of millions of lives.

But I do recognise my opions are controversial.

 

[Dante]

good point, not sure about the invasion of britain, i think thats a hard one to call, i suspect that any invasion would ultimately have faile. though the nazi's might have gained a foothold, they would have suffered massive losses in shipping, casuing huge destruction to their supply lines, essentially the problem faced in russia, but exacerbated by the need to cart things acroos the channel.

Saying that there are arguements on both sides to approve or disapprove the hypothesis.

As it stands though i would say that stalingrad, or launching the drive to stalingrad was the mistake, perhaps more in that it alientaed the wehrmacht high command from hitlers lunacy, making a division between politcs and army that was not recovered from.

One interesting thing i've been considering though is that if we pick one moment as the defintitve point (say D-Day for sake of arguement and because im wathcing the longest day)

What was the decisive moment in that battle/campaign. and so in turn can we pinpoint the deciseve action by thei individual or small rgoup of individuals that was the turning point? or is this just a for want of nail arguement?

 

[Khardran]

From a grand strategic point of view i would say that the only contender for key turning point has to be the US entry into the war. From that point it was only a matter of when, not if, the war was won.

As far as the battle of Britain goes Len Deighton's book Fighter has some very good analysis of the actual numbers. Also it is quite easy to forget that any invasion of Britain would have had to have occurred in the teeth of the still largely intact home fleet.

In my opinion the war in the east was lost when Hitler abandoned the assault on Moscow and diverted his attention to the Caucasus. Stalingrad was simply the sorry outcome of that policy. If the Nazi's had sustained the attack on Moscow it is likely they could have had very favourable terms from Russia's capitulation.

If one were going to pick a decision that lost D-Day it was Hitler's refusal to release the Panzer reserves further north. Without that reserve to stiffen the defence Rommels prediction that the allies needed to be thrown back within a day or never dislodged proved prescient.

 

[Dillinger4]

The Holocaust was the key turning point.

 

[Belushi]

The Holocaust was the key turning point.

How did the holocaust affect the outcome of the war?

 

[Dillinger4]

How did the holocaust affect the outcome of the war?

I have absoloutly no evidence behind what I am saying, I dont know of any Historians who may agree, but it was the point Germany started getting their pritorities seriously wrong.

 

[gorski]

American Nazis/Fascists not winning their little domestic struggle... that was the real turning point in power relations...